Nowhere to go but up

Herald StaffWednesday, December 19, 2012

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With the new year approaching, the time couldn’t be better for a fresh start at the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy.

Nancy Brennan, who has headed the Conservancy since 2005, is moving on and frankly we’ll not weep salty tears about that. While she was competent at many of the programming aspects of the job — gourmet food trucks, arts festivals — she showed little or no awareness of what it means to work for a quasi-public agency.

Sadly her “stewardship” will be best remembered for those months when “Occupiers” turned portions of what should be a public treasure into an open sewer. While Brennan played enabler to the merry band of great unwashed at Dewey Square, it was the taxpayers who ultimately paid the price for its destruction and required renovation.

Perhaps because Brennan reported to so many “bosses” — the Conservancy board, the state Transportation Department, local land owners — she had apparently come to believe she was accountable to no one. The millions of dollars in state money the Conservancy got each year (about 40 percent of its funding comes from taxpayers) brought with it a level of public scrutiny to which Brennan acquiesced only with the greatest reluctance — including disclosure of her own $185,000-a-year salary, one of four executives at the Conservancy earning more than $100,000. Now keep in the mind, the job is to supervise 1.3 miles of linear parkland.

And when state officials demanded that the Conservancy wean itself off public money, Brennan responded by registering as a lobbyist to seek more taxpayer dollars.

That level of tone deafness can’t be tolerated in Brennan’s successor, who will need to accept as his or her mission the need for the Greenway to become a self-sustaining entity — responsive to its neighbors, responsible to the taxpayers and a credit to the city it graces.